The Chris Voss Show - The Chris Voss Show Podcast – Welcome Home: A Guide to Building a Home for Your Soul by Najwa Zebian

Episode Date: May 20, 2021

Welcome Home: A Guide to Building a Home for Your Soul by Najwa Zebian Najwazebian.com From the celebrated poet, speaker, and educator comes a powerful blueprint for healing by building a home within yourself. “A master class in self-actualization and compassion.”—Mari Andrew, New York Times bestselling author of Am I There Yet? In her debut book of inspiration, poet Najwa Zebian shares her revolutionary concept of home—the place of safety where you can embrace your vulnerability and discover your self-worth. It’s the place where your soul feels like it belongs, where you are loved for who you are. Too many of us build our homes in other people in the hope that they will deem us worthy of being welcomed inside, and then we feel abandoned and empty when those people leave. Building your home inside yourself—and never experiencing inner homelessness again—begins here. In Welcome Home, Zebian shares her personal story for the first time, powerfully weaving memoir, poetry, and deeply resonant teachings into her storytelling, from leaving Lebanon at sixteen, to coming of age as a young Muslim woman in Canada, to building a new identity for herself as she learned to speak her truth. After the profound alienations she experienced, she learned to build a stable foundation inside herself, an identity independent of cultural expectations and the influence of others. The powerful metaphor of home provides a structure for personal transformation as she shows you how to construct the following rooms: Self-Love, Forgiveness, Compassion, Clarity, Surrender, and The Dream Garden. With practical tools and prompts for self-understanding, she shows you how to build each room in your house, which form a firm basis for your self-worth, sense of belonging, and happiness. Every human deserves their own home. Written with her trademark power, candor, and warmth, Welcome Home is an answer to the pain we all experience when we don't feel at peace with ourselves. About Najwa Zebian Najwa Zebian is a Lebanese-Canadian activist, author, speaker, and educator. Her search for a home was central to her early years as she struggled to find her place in the world. She became a teacher and a doctoral candidate in educational leadership and as Najwa began to write in an effort to connect with and heal her first students, a group of young refugees, she found that she was also writing to heal herself. After self-publishing her first collection of poetry and prose in 2016, she went on to sell over 250,000 copies of her three books. She recently launched a digital school, Soul Academy, and a podcast, Stories of the Soul. Her work has been featured in the New York Times, Glamour, Elle Canada, HuffPost, and more. Her TEDx talk "Finding Home Through Poetry" has been viewed over more than 100,000 times.

You wanted the best. You've got the best podcast, the hottest podcast in the world. The Chris Voss Show, the preeminent podcast with guests so smart you may experience serious brain bleed. Get ready, get ready, strap yourself in. Keep your hands, arms and legs inside the vehicle at all times. Because you're about to go on a monster education roller coaster with your brain now here's your host chris voss hi folks response here from the chris voss show.com the chris voss show.com hey we're coming here in our great podcast we certainly appreciate you guys tuning in thanks for being here and even more thanks for referring the show to your family, friends, relatives.

Get everyone involved in the show. Tell them to go to iTunes or wherever it is. You can go to chrisvoss.club or thechrisvossshow.com. And you can subscribe for free. It's an unlimited subscription for an unlimited time available for free. So you want to take advantage of it while it's still out there. So you can also do that with youtube.com, 4chesschrisvoss, to see the wonderful interviews we have of all the brilliant authors and people that are on The Chris Voss Show. Also go to goodreads.com, 4chesschrisvoss,

to see what we're reading and reviewing. You can also go to all the different groups we have on LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, TikTok, all those different places where we share out the show. You can see everything that we have going on with the show and all the good stuff. Subscribe to all those different social platforms. Today, as always, every day, we have an amazing author on The Chris Foss Show. She's the author of four books and the newest book she has coming out June 1st, 2021. It's entitled Welcome Home, A Guide to Building a Home for Your Soul. I think I'm going to really like this book because I've been doing a lot of soul searching. I think we all have value

searching. The name of the author is Najwa Zavian. She's going to be talking to say about her book and everything she's been working on. And she's got an amazing career that she's had and this episode is brought to you by a sponsor ifi-audio.com and their micro idst signature it's a top of the range desktop transportable DAC and headphone app that will supercharge your headphones it has two brown burr DAC chips in it and will decode high res audio and mqa files we're using in the right now. I've loved my experience with it so far. It just makes everything sound so much more richer and better and takes things to the next level. IFI Audio is an award-winning audio tech company

with one aim in mind, to improve your music enjoyment of quality sound, eradicate noise, distortion, and hiss from your listening experience. Check out their new incredible lineup of dax and audio enhancement devices at ifi-audio.com she is a lebanese canadian activist author speaker and educator her recent book welcome home a guide to building a home for your soul uh is going to be what we'll be talking about today.

Her search for a home was central to her early years as she struggled to find her place in the world. She became a teacher and a doctoral candidate in educational leadership. As she began to write in an effort to connect and heal her first students, a group of young refugees, she found that she was also writing to heal herself. The author of three collections of poetry, she delivered the TEDx talk, Finding Home Through Poetry, and recently launched a digital school, Soul Academy, and a podcast, Stories of the Soul. Her work has been featured in the New York Times, Glamour, Elle, Canada, Huffington Post, and more.

Welcome to the show. How are you? I'm doing really well. How are you? There you go. We're doing excellent. Congratulations on the book coming out June 1st. People can dig and order that baby up.

Give us your plugs where people can order that on the internet and find out more about you. Yeah. So you can find me on Instagram, Facebook, Tik TOK, Pinterest, LinkedIn. It's all,

and YouTube. It's all the same username. It's at Najwa Zabian, N-A-J-W-A-Z-E-B-I-A-N. And you can find welcome home literally wherever books are sold. And for those who are watching, that's what it looks like. There you go. Beautiful cover by the way.

Yeah. Thank you. So I would love to actually talk to you about the thought process behind the cover at some point. Oh, do you want to start doing that? We'll just get right up to the top with that. Good. So I've always used the analogy of a bird in all of my books. And that was never intentional. The very first thing I wrote where I used the bird was in my first book, Mind Platter.

And the entry was called, what was the entry called? I don't remember the title, but I remember what it was about. So Broken Wings, that's what it's called. Broken Wings. And I began by saying, don't break a bird's wings and then tell it to fly. Because that's how I felt. I felt like my wings had been broken. And, you know, the people who caused me that pain were looking at me and saying, why aren't you flying?

Why aren't you shining? And so there was an element of gaslighting there. And I found that I wrote about it in my second book and in my third book, just the analogy of I'm a bird and I have this freedom. And sometimes I choose not to use that freedom because I allow myself to dip into that pain that others have caused me and say, you broke my wings or you weakened my wings or you led me to a place and now I'm lost and I don't know how to get back when really what I needed to be believing in was my ability to say, you know, I can fly on my own. I don't need you and I can heal on my own. I don't need you. So in Welcome Home, the analogy of a bird

coming back to its nest, it's me coming back to myself. It's the person reading the book coming back to themselves. So that's why we used that. And you probably notice if you look at the cover, there's gold feathers and the in the wings. And that is because I speak about a concept in the book called gold stitching your soul. So after you go through some kind of experience that breaks you, I say stitch your soul back together with gold. Don't look at yourself as I'm only healing. If I can go back to the version of myself that I was before the pain instead, accept the fact that you are broken, you are now broken. And all you have to do is now that you are just broken wide open, and you're in pieces, what usually happens is that we don't really know ourselves

before we break in a way that opens our eyes up to what is actually within us. All of those pieces, now that you're broken, you could look at each one of them and say, oh, you know, I'm an empath. Oh, I'm somebody who loves giving. Oh, I'm somebody who is very forgiving. And now you see all of that. And instead of saying you deserve to be broken into those pieces, you say, I embrace those parts of myself and I'm going to put them back together, stitch myself with gold and create this new masterpiece. So that's where the cover of Welcome Home comes from. That's pretty amazing. And don't you do some writing on, you know,

Phoenix from the ashes and things of that nature? And that's, that's a part of your work. Yes, my third book, Sparks of Phoenix follows the stages of, you know, a phoenix burning to ashes, and then, you know, coming out of the ashes and being reborn in a beautiful masterpiece that no one believed would be born again. No one believed they just believed that they could burn you out. And that's it, you would be done. But the beautiful thing about sparks of phoenix, and again, and using the same analogy is you get to decide what you do with the pain that comes your way. This doesn't mean I always get this comment. This doesn't mean that you deserved what you went through.

And this doesn't mean that taking the time that you need to heal is a shameful thing at all. Some people take years to heal. Take that time. But you are the one who gets to decide that you are going to get up, that you are going to not continue being in that place where you're waiting for the one person who broke you or the few people who broke you to come back and say, I'm sorry, I hurt you. I shouldn't have done that. Do not request the validation of those who hurt you or the permission of those who hurt you to tell you now you have permission to heal. You can make that choice on your own. So in Sparks of Phoenix, the chapter that's right in the middle

is also called Sparks of Phoenix because that's the beginning. Those are the realizations that you make that kind of start that spark of you getting reborn. Like the one who broke you cannot heal you, you know, pain comes when it comes, not when you went, not when you're ready for it. And it leaves when it leaves, not when you want it to all of these realizations about acceptance about coming back to yourself about owning your healing, just like you owned your pain, that is the most important part of healing. The journey upwards is beautiful, because you're constantly getting that validation from yourself, that now I'm on the rise, I'm showing myself, but it's it's that it's the that moment in between being in a very dark place and choosing to start coming out of it, that's the most crucial one.

Yeah. That's really beautiful. You know, a lot of people are afraid to embrace their brokenness or their pain or, or face being broken or the fact that they are broken and they can never reconcile it until they do. Is that correct? Absolutely. I think when you judge yourself based on what you went through, when there's an element of, and I talk about this in Welcome Home, when there's an element of you taking every single break that happens in your life and whatever ending it leads you to, when you take that one ending and make it confirm for you whatever belief it is that you have about yourself, you get stuck in not wanting to accept this ending without getting the closure that you need or without turning it around and changing the narrative so that that ending doesn't happen or happens on your own terms. because you think if I change this one ending, I change all the other endings, or I change the ending belief that I always go back to, which most times is, I'm not worthy, I don't deserve love, I don't deserve attention, I don't deserve effort. So you think by changing that one ending, so you resist accepting that you're broken. You resist accepting that something

happened that you yourself need to recognize this is wrong. And me walking away doesn't mean that everything that I gave is, you know, was it wasn't worth it doesn't mean that everything that I gave went to waste, or I was taken advantage of or whatever. I could say what I gave, what I invested in someone. And this goes back to the message in Welcome Home. Stop building homes in other people. When we build homes in other people, we invest parts of ourselves in them. So all of that love that we put in someone else, that we give someone else, all the time we spend on them, all the money we spend on them, anything that we invest in a relationship with that home that I'm investing in, I can come

home to it at the end of the day, and all of the stuff that I've put in it is available to me. And so what happens when that person walks away, or when you lose that job, or you lose that sense of identity that you had for so long, all of that stuff that you put in there goes away, and you genuinely feel empty. And you're also used to investing so much and you have all this new, you know, this new growth within that you want to continue invest because you're so used to giving and it has no place to go. And the beautiful thing is instead of dwelling on why someone isn't continuing to take what you have to give, you have to realize that all of that stuff that you're creating belongs to you and you deserve it. So start

building that home within yourself. And to do that, you have to recognize that that break that you experienced, that whatever situation it was that caused you pain, you must come to terms with it, you must accept it. And you must say, this will not be easy, because I'm so used to seeing myself through other people's eyes. I'm so used to getting that validation externally, that what I have to offer is worth it. And now how do I get that validation? I don't know how to give that validation to myself. So the journey back to yourself, back to building a home within begins with that recognition. And the road that leads you to the land on which you will build a home within is all about recognizing all of the roadblocks that you have in your way,

which could be beliefs that you've developed from a young age, which could be, I don't want to feel this pain. I don't want to accept that someone broke me. I don't want to accept that I've been, you know, lied to and you break those roadblocks and turn them into road bricks that will lead you to that land where now you can say, okay, now that I've resolved all of that, I am ready to start accepting myself. I'm ready to build that strong foundation of a home within where everything that I'm so used to giving to other people, now I can start giving to myself. You know, this is really brilliant. I went through experiences in my life. Howard Stern, there was a famous Howard Stern thing where when he had a breakup with one of the comedians early

on the show, I forget his name, which is kind of funny because I don't remember his name, but I remember Howard Stern's name. And Howard Stern, when this comedian left the show, Jackie Matling, I believe, Jackie, Jackie, the joke man, when he left the show, he thought that he had lost his, his, his mojo, his talent, his, he couldn't do the show anymore. He'd lost his partner and that that partner was a large part of the show. And what happened was he discovered that he really was the show. He'd always been the show and he could replace this person. I went through the same thing with a business partner that I was friends with for 22 years and business partner for 13. And I

thought as us being a team, that a lot of my mojo, a lot of my creative process, you know, I was the CEO, he was the vice president. I didn't realize I'd been carrying him all my life and I could replace him with, you know, a secretary for the amount of work and creativity was contributing. But when we, we separated our partnership, I really felt lost. I felt like, Oh my God, I don't, you know, and what you talk about and having your own home and you've been putting so much in other people's homes that you don't take care of your own was kind of my position. And I went through the same catharsis where I realized that I'd always been the proponent. I'd always been the guy all these years, and I could just go keep being the guy. And I really didn't lose a part of me. I actually lose something that was a weight on me.

And so it was an interesting journey that I went in cathartic thing. And I think a lot of people do sometimes with their relationships. Yes, absolutely. And any relationship. That's why I said it's not just romantic relationships. We build our sense of who we are through the way that the world around us sees us. And it's usually, and I also talk about this in Welcome Home, one of the biggest barriers on your journey to changing is that little audience that you have in the back of your head. And they're usually people that you know, like a business partner, a former business partner, an ex family, usually it's the people who you really you've invested in them, whether it's emotionally or any kind of investment. And you're worried about how they're going to perceive

that change, because they're going to say, Oh, you've changed, or you're not like that. I'm not used to you being like that. And I, one of the strategies that I use in Welcome Home is see a bigger audience, identify who is your audience. I had a moment once when someone, a reporter asked me, I was speaking up about women's rights. And I was speaking up about an experience of mine. And, you know, I talked about what, what really stands in the way of us listening to stories, not just, not just sexual harassment that happens to women, but also men is that there is that fear out there of judgment, and there's that fear of retaliation. And so the reporter asked me, aren't you scared that what you're saying is going to put you in a worse position? And I said to her,

I am not an amplifier of the voice of bullying, hatred, people who incite fear. I am, that's a little audience of mine. Yeah, maybe that scares me a little bit. I am the voice and the amplifier of the voice of those who are on the other side, those who are sitting in a dark corner thinking, you know, if I speak up, then X, Y, and Z is going to happen to me. And I'm the one standing here saying, do it, speak up. So the audience that you are serving, the audience that would benefit from you actually changing and speaking up for yourself and becoming a stronger person is usually 99% of the real audience that you have. And it's that 1% that stops you and slows you down. And at the end of the day,

if they are people who really, really love you and care for you genuinely, they wouldn't be part of that 1%. They would be pushing you to be better. So see a bigger audience, identify who that audience that you always go to in the back of your mind before you post something on social media, before you make a decision in your life, before you publicize something, before you take that one step towards a dream of yours.

Who are the first people who come to mind that scare you away from that? And just recognize, yes, they're there. They'll always be there. But the world is so much bigger than that. That's very true. I love that. I, you know, I went through an experience in my life where when my first dog kid died, I was, I was just wrecked.

And I really don't, you know, I have my social media, large audience. So I share everything with them. You know, I'm just a single guy with dog kids. So, you know, I, I, I had this moment where I wanted to share what I was experiencing and just to bleed it out, just to, just to get it out of my soul and of the loss. And I spent like a half an hour waiting to press the post button because I was like, this is way too personal.

I don't want to share this. I don't want to. This is, it seems almost too selfish to me. Like, this is all about me. Like, blah, blah, blah, my problems, blah, blah, blah. And finally, I just pressed post and I went to bed. And what was amazing to me was how many people it helped. Like, I thought it was a selfish act, me sharing my pain, me sharing my story, my journey.

I thought it was a selfish act. And I thought it was way too personal because I was just letting people know how much it hurt. And I was stunned. And it's one of the lessons that I've had to learn, you know, and being authentic and everything else was how many people, like you said, the audience that spread to, I had people write me that, oh my God, I realized I never had closure in the death of my animals, the death of my dad or my family. I never got closure. And me watching you go through the experience and share it made me realize, wow, I need to wrap that up myself.

It was astounding how many people it really helped. And it was the farthest thing from a selfish act. Like you said, that audience, I just found the audience and people who love me went, we embrace you, Chris, and we're here for you. People are calling me the next day. It was just astounding to me. Have you ever heard of the saying that goes, grief is just love with no place to go? No.

Wow. That's beautiful. So in your case, you were experiencing grief. You were, you were, you had that intensity of love and it had nowhere to go because the place that it went was just lost by you. And you gave permission to everyone that you shared it with to allow you to, to feel like you're giving that love, you know, by helping them feel heard and seen like someone telling you, you know, I didn't realize how much I didn't heal from the loss of my pet or the loss of someone in my life that you feel immediately that that love that you have

pent up somehow in the honor of what you lost or who you lost is has a place to go. So I think that's so beautiful. That's really beautiful. What you said. Wow. That's amazing. I'm going to go back in the show. I'm going to write that down. It's just extraordinary. You know, one thing you mentioned back, I'm going to fall back probably two or three topics ago, but you talked about how people, you know, we talked about how people don't come to grips with being broken and their grief and stuff. And sometimes what I see in a lot of people is the imprint and the struggle they have with their ego of a loss, whether it's with a spouse or a boyfriend or a girlfriend or a business partner. You know, like I struggle with that when I went through my challenge of like, who am I and what am I and where am I? And a lot of people really struggle because they won't sit down and, or I think they won't. I'm going to leave this to you to tell me. But sometimes they're stuck with that imprint and

they just carry it with them. Like if someone cheats on them or whatever it is, they carry that forever. And it's such an insult to their ego that they can't let it go. And they just carry it like this sick stone everywhere. Is dealing with your broken pieces, dealing with some of that thing, a way to try and come to grips with that or reconcile it? So what happens in cases like that is carrying an identity of I'm somebody who was wronged. I'm somebody who was let down. That is so much easier to carry than to actually have to deal with yourself and with who you are. So you'd rather stick to that identity because it gives you a definition.

I'm somebody, it makes you feel important in some way. I'm somebody who's been blah, blah, blah. I'm somebody who was treated a certain way. Instead of just saying, I accept that, that doesn't define me. But, oh, wait a minute. If that doesn't define me, what does? That's the hard part. That ego that comes in the way is just our own resistance from coming or in the face of coming home to who we are. We don't know ourselves.

So many people spend their whole life not knowing who they are. So in Welcome Home, I do talk about how your ego, it's there to constantly make you feel that sense of whatever that belief you have about yourself, it's going to continue to prove it to you so that you can feel that sense of like drive, like, you know, people who just want to succeed in life so that they could show someone who hurt them in the past, see, I'm doing better. That's, that's not authentic growth. Authentic growth comes from being able to forgive that. That's why one of the rooms or chapters in Welcome Home, one of the rooms that you'll have in your home is the room of forgiveness, which is all about letting go. Not about saying that was okay. It's about not defining yourself by those finite moments that happened in your life that you've

made into infinite because you continue to define yourself that way you let go of what that moment in time what that event told you about yourself and you can come at it from a more empathetic angle towards yourself and towards the person who hurt you and I'm not saying like say oh you know everybody deserves to be loved and they did it because they were in a bad place. I don't mean that. I mean, just saying, you know, someone can't meet me past where they've met themselves and saying, you know, if if someone had the ability to hurt me in that way, it doesn't mean anything about me. And if that's their responsibility, that's their weight to carry, not mine, but we end up carrying that weight ourselves. Because if they hurt us

that way, we already believe that we deserve to be hurt. And we don't want to deal with that belief about ourselves. We look at that and say, Oh, you did something that confirmed for me something that I believe about myself, and that really hurts. But we don't want to go from the point of why, why does that event hurt so much to what is it that I need to heal about myself so that in the future, if somebody were to do that to me, I could look at that event and say, that had nothing to do with me. I didn't deserve that. So that's what stands in the way. It's you not knowing where to begin with dealing with your own self and defining your own self. Because once you do, like think about it this way. Once you've built a home within yourself, and once you genuinely, genuinely believe that your authentic self and I lead people through exercises and welcome home

to get in touch with who you authentically are without labels without what your age is without what your gender is without just getting in touch with who you authentically are on the inside and people ask me how do I differentiate between who I am and who my ego tells me I am? I always say your ego is very reactive. It's if somebody closes, opens the door for you and, you know, they closed it in your face before you even got there, you're immediately your ego says, see, that person doesn't care about you. And that proves to you that people don't care about you, that you don't deserve to be cared about.

That's your ego. It's very reactive and it's constantly taking things personally. Who you authentically are is that calm, peaceful being within you that is so detached, like not unaware, aware of what the world is doing to you, of what's happening around you,

but detached from what that awareness means about you. So once you build a home within yourself, what that means is that you, you see yourself through your own eyes, when you look in the mirror, you're able to see the way that you feel about yourself on the inside, you know what? I tried really hard. You know what? I'm an honest person. I gave truth to that person who lied to me. Just because they lied to me,

it doesn't mean, you know, the other word that I could define myself by or the phrase is not worthy of being told the truth. No, change that. You're not actually saying that to yourself. What you really believe about yourself is all the beautiful things you have within even if they are areas of improvement but you are the one who's giving that voice not anyone else around you and not your ego once you do that you can genuinely come home to yourself at the end of the day and say, this is what happened from my point of view. I don't need someone else's

validation that what happened actually happened and that what happened is worthy of, you know, me setting some kind of a boundary or reinforcing some kind of a boundary or breaking my connection to this person. You are, this is going to be a very powerful statement. You should never be your plan B, C, D, or whatever for yourself. So it's not just when there's no one else out there that's giving you validation that you're like, okay, I guess I have to come to myself no you are your plan a you come to yourself first for everything that you need and to come with to come to the realization of what you need from others you are that point of reference you're

not a backup plan your own definition of who you are your authentic self isn't based on you know isn't the priority isn't to see yourself through someone else's eyes the priority is you see yourself through your eyes you could be aware of how others see you but that's not your first point of reference and it's just i think it's so powerful and so beautiful and so freeing and liberating to live that way. Yeah, that's brilliant. So would a good analogy be, don't let other people define you, define yourself? Yes. Don't let other people define you, define yourself. Don't allow other people to define what is right and wrong for you. And I come from this, you know, in a very general, from a very general perspective, but also when it comes to culture, religion, community, whatever community you belong to.

I feel that I see that so many people forget to even ask themselves, but do I believe that? Do I believe that that's the right way of living? We don't because we're trained from a very young age to believe certain things. And there's a place in Welcome Home where I talk about that actually, as I was narrating the audiobook, I cried, I couldn't read it without tearing up. It's the moment I realized when I had been wronged, broken very much. And I said, what hurt in that moment, wasn't all the lies that were told. It wasn't, you know, seeing people's real faces. It wasn't that the outcome wasn't what I hoped it would be. It wasn't I listed all those things. And I said, it was all of that. But the most painful thing was that when I walked out that door, I had no idea who I was, because I had defined myself by that pain for so long, that now that it was over, and I had no

control of the situation, I had no idea who I was. And I had no idea that I could question, who am I? What do I believe in? You know, do I really have a choice? Because I always came with this, with this, like internalized, almost like it was part of my being, that I'm somebody who is always wronged by others. And even though that may have been true, that wasn't who I was, that was what was happening to me. And so when you come to terms with the fact that you really don't know who you are, and that you've never given yourself permission to contemplate that question. And the reason I'm saying, you know, don't let anyone define right and wrong for you is a lot of the times when we think of how do I know who I am, we see it as more of a like spiritual, inspirational kind of thing. But knowing who you are is through action, right?

The moment you start actually asking, like seeking validation from within, what happens is when that, when what your inner self is telling you and what your authentic self is telling you, you need to do in your life to actually embrace who you are, but you are still allowing voices and rules and yes and no from external sources to stop you from moving in the direction that embraces through action who you are. You immediately feel like you're betraying yourself and you don't want to feel that. So this path is familiar, the path of following the rules and everything. So I will continue to follow that path, but at the same time, resent everyone and resent myself. So that's what stops us from answering

that question. Who am I? That's amazing. Wow. Are you a psychologist? I mean, it's brilliant. My experience. Yeah, yeah. I know. We kind of reach that eventually, don't we? This is really brilliant. So in the book, you have different, you know, I talk about the house structure itself, but you talk about different rooms. Do you want to give us some examples of some of those rooms? Absolutely. So when I thought of how do you take that inspirational idea of building a home within yourself, that concept

and make it practical? I thought, you know, think about a house, what makes a house, a house, like, you know, you've gone through moments like this in your life, where if a friend of yours were to come to you with a problem, you would know the exact solution, you would know how to tell them what they deserve, what they don't deserve, what they need to walk away from. But when it comes to your own life, you're like, you know, but I'm different. And I understand people, I understand where they're coming from. And so I went through that. And I went through this, it felt like I was a hypocrite, because I knew so much about what love looks like. I knew so much about what living authentically looks like, but I wasn't putting it into action. And I asked myself in the context of building a home within

yourself, how does that apply? And it is this, you could have all the elements that make that home, which are your understanding of love, your understanding of forgiveness, getting clarity on your life, surrendering to your positive and negative emotions, having compassion. Those are all rooms, by the way, in Malcolm home. But what is it that makes that a home? It's the togetherness of all of that. And what causes that togetherness? It's a strong foundation. And once that came to me, I was like, Oh my God, this is why I know so much. But I don't apply it because the foundation of self acceptance and self awareness is not there. I hadn't fully accepted myself, my authentic self. I just thought, if I learned everything about self love, and if I learned everything about self love, and if I learned

everything about being authentic, that that's enough if I could speak about it. And, but I wasn't applying it because myself, why my own self was being rejected by me, I wasn't seeing myself for who I really am. And maybe that in certain moments meant that I thought I was a lot stronger than I actually was, because I wanted to be a lot stronger than I actually was, because I wanted to be a lot stronger than I actually was. But so the foundation, so in Welcome Home, you'll find the chapters of the road to home. So again, beginning with, you know, coming to a place of understanding that I need to walk away from, I need to accept certain endings in my life, I need to debunk all the myths that I've told myself about myself. And I need to get to a

place where I'm ready to come home to myself. After that, you start with the foundation of the two elements, self acceptance and self awareness. And through that, I guide you through going back to your earliest memories of forming those core beliefs about yourself. And I talk about my own story. The first time in my life where I looked at what I was missing in my life, which was love and belonging and feeling like I had a strong, loving family because at the time my family was

between Lebanon and Canada and I spent quite a bit of time with different relatives. I wanted that consistency, that home. And as an eight or nine-year- old, I remember the first moment I thought when I saw, you know, my cousins with their parents opening gifts, and I wasn't part of that. And I wasn't part of that. The first question that came to me was, why can't I have that? And that's what stuck with me until my later years. I'm 31 now. But until these few most recent years is every time I would feel like I wasn't part, I wasn't

important to someone I wasn't worthy of being held on to, I would go back to that moment. Why can't I have that? And I realized that and I write about this in detail in Welcome Home, that the question itself indicated that that was something I could not have. So the question doesn't have to be, why can't I have that? It's, why don't I have that? And once I change that word, then there is possibility there. And there is an ability to put forward whatever I need to put forward to have that. And so I lead whoever

is reading Welcome Home to that point of going back to those core beliefs, and then changing the narrative, having more empathy towards yourself and not judging yourself for everything you'd accepted before that you didn't deserve that maybe you didn't know you didn't deserve. And maybe you did, which I think makes it harder for people when they're like, no, I knew what I was doing. I knew what I deserve. Still, forgive yourself, forgive yourself. So once you build that strong foundation of knowing what led you to the point in your life that you are at now, knowing what leads you to, in so many instances, accepting way less than what you deserve, accepting scraps of people's love and attention, or whatever it is,

and then being aware of how your mind makes stories of current things that happen in your life that prove all of that for you. Or it's like confirmation bias. You see what you're looking for. You see what you already believe. So once you have those two elements of self-acceptance and self-awareness done, that your foundation is done, now you put the rooms. And the rooms, the first one is self-love, the room of self-awareness done, that your foundation is done, now you put the rooms. And the rooms, the first one is self-love, the room of self-love. And I put that first because to me, that's the most important one. And I talk about how love is not just a word. I say,

if you love someone, how do you show them your love? Tell me, what things do you do? Okay. So don't just stop at saying I love myself. Well, how do you love yourself? Show yourself through action that you love yourself. So I have several strategies in there for self love. One of them is very simple. It's just imagining that you're flipping a switch, and you're turning from self hatehate mode to self-love mode, period. Like the moment you sense that you're telling yourself, what is wrong with you? How could you not finish all of that? Or the moment you sense yourself speaking to yourself in a hateful way, you say, I'm going to switch to self-love mode. And I'm going to talk to myself the way that I speak to the person I love the most. Because you know what happens when I ask people, who are the people you love the most? Like the one, two, three people that you love the most. List them for me.

Okay. Now imagine you are up there right next to them. People start crying because they've never seen themselves as worthy of the kind of love that they give to others they think their worthiness of love is based on how much they're able to give and it's like without anything that you have to give you you on your own and this is not to say this is not the same as the messaging that's just like just be who you are and just do what you want and not in an arrogant kind of way. It's more like, stop working so hard just to be loved. Love isn't hard. Just like you give love so easily to others, you deserve that love in return, first of all, from yourself. So that's self love. And then the

forgiveness room comes next. And so I called the strategies in each room in a way that would reflect it was kind of like furniture or an element that is like real. So in the self love room, I call them gems, because I imagine the self love room to be full of like really beautiful, authentic things. And in the forgiveness room, I call them outlets because to me, forgiving is letting go, which means you need an outlet. Just like we talked about grief. You need an outlet for that pain. You need to be able to let go. And the question I begin contemplating in the forgiveness room is how far back do I have to go?

And who do I have to forgive? Do I have anything to forgive? You know, I feel like I haven't really let go of the ways I've been wronged. I always come back to that, right? Like I define myself by what people have done to me. And it gives me a sense of importance. But really, at the end of the day, it hurts because I'm still allowing them that kind of power. So one of the activities that I talk about is cutting the cords. So if you imagine the person that hurt you as and you imagine yourself as a marionette, and they are controlling that marionette by the pain that they caused you, and you're still allowing what they did to you to hurt you, because you are somehow attached to it, whether it's by saying,

oh, I want them to regret it one day, or I can't believe they haven't asked for my forgiveness. You're still giving them power. So I get you to imagine taking scissors that are made of the foundation of your home, which are that self-acceptance and self-awareness, the two blades, and you cut, you go to each cord, each thought that you have that ties you to that person. And you just say, I accept you and I release you. And to me, that was one of the most powerful things that I could do. So in the forgiveness room,

I give various strategies to be able to forgive. And I also talk about my own story of how I got to that point. And then we have the compassion room, which is the only room in your home that you're allowed to allow people in. So, you know, you don't allow anyone into your self love room, that's yours. You don't allow anyone in forgiveness room, that's yours. Whether someone apologizes or not, you're still the one in charge of that forgiveness the compassion room is all about do not allow someone to enter your home without compassion don't and and don't allow someone to enter your thoughts or to affect your opinion of yourself through their opinions or without if they're not coming in with compassion so this could be applicable in so many ways on social media.

The comments that you read that get to you, they get to you because you're still accepting someone who clearly has no empathy towards you and has no willingness to help you because those are the two things that make compassion, empathy and a willingness to help. You're allowing someone who's not coming with that to affect you and to affect the way that you're feeling. So you can see that. But you can also say you are not welcome in my home, you are not welcome into my thoughts, you are not welcome into my emotions. You know,

so compassion is one of the rooms where i also talk about i give the analogy of if you were inviting people over to dinner into your home who would be on your guest list and if somebody were to enter your home and they started you know they insulted you and they insulted someone that you love would you invite invite them again? The answer is no. So why would you allow someone in real life who say you were close with them, you built some kind of connection with them, and then they hurt you? Why do you still allow them power? Like, why do you allow them into your space, into your spiritual space, into your, your physical space? Why do you still do that? Because on a logical level, you know,

that you have the power to say no. And so I go back to what is it that stops us from saying no, what kind of conditioning we've, we've had that stops us from telling someone, you know what, that really hurt. And you don't deserve to be able to be welcome into my home. And then I talk about self-compassion. And I say, look at that guest list. Are you on that guest list? Do you sit with your guests and eat the food that you made? Yes.

Okay. Well, then do that in your real life and give yourself what you so easily give to others when you invite them into your life. Then we get to the clarity room. And this is one of my favorites. The clarity room allows you to see yourself clearly through your own eyes. So all of that, those definitions, those labels that you and I were talking about, I allow you to just see them for what they are, understand where they came from and say, okay, I get this, but this doesn't define me anymore. I define me. So one activity is called the, so the, the, the strategies in this room are mirrors, because you're supposed to see yourself clearly. And I say, imagine a mirror that hasn't been cleaned in a long time. And you're looking at it, you're just gonna see a blurry image, you don't know who you are, you're gonna have to start cleaning and cleaning it is understanding all those labels that you've come to right now, where they're coming from and saying, Nope, nope, nope, nope, nope. And I'm the

one who gets to define who I see in the mirrors. The clarity room is one of the most powerful ones. And then we get to the surrender room. And while writing that room, I came to my own realization that I was talking about surrendering to emotions. And I was just talking about surrendering to the negative ones. And I use the analogy of like someone knocking on your door. Right? Hear the knock. to the negative ones and i use the analogy of like someone knocking on your door right here's a knock if you hear that hear this for the first while it's annoying if you don't open the door it's going to keep knocking that's what pain does pain doesn't go away on its own you have to feel it you have to allow it in i say after a while you get used to that you get used to that, you get used to it. And you kind of forget that it's there,

but it's still affecting the way that you live your life. So you adapt your life, so that that pain can still be there waiting to be felt by you. But you know, you haven't really taken it out of the way. So it's kind of like, you're making room for an unwelcome, like you're blocking out a certain room in your home that can be used and you need space, but you're not giving yourself space because you just don't want to deal with it. So I say have tea with your pain. That's one of the strategies in the surrender room is have tea with your pain. And I call the strategy submissions because you're submitting to what's going on in your life. So allow your pain. And I call the strategy submissions, because you're submitting to what's going on in your life. So allow your pain and when pain knocks on your door, open the door, let it in, have tea with it, understand it, then let it go, because there's another emotion waiting.

So I realized after writing all of that, that I only spoke about negative emotions. And it opened my eyes to the fact that that is mostly what I experienced in my life. And I always felt so ashamed to feel positive emotions. So I talk about how surrendering to your emotions is both allowing yourself to feel the negative, but also not being ashamed to feel the positive and allowing yourself to feel the positive. Open yourself up to love after someone cheated on you. Open yourself up to a new business connection after somebody broke your trust before, you know? And then after that, we have the dream garden,

which is where you contemplate what your purpose in life is. And the strategies there are called watering cans. Because once you make a certain realization, you have to water it. And those realizations are all about don't have such a strict plan for what your life needs to look like. And take the next step that you can take and be open. I talk about my journey of transitioning from teaching to writing because I was going from a little classroom to a huge massive classroom, which is the world. So I talk about that story and how I got there. And once you're done with that, there's the art of listening to yourself.

I talk about the importance of going within instead of going without. And that's where you, again, get a new way of connecting with your authentic self in more practical ways. And after that, we have what rooms would you add in your home? And I talk about how I would add the writing room. And every room, by the way, has pillars that keep it up. And those pillars, the outlets or submissions or gems that I talked about are, you know, they come under those pillars and help you. So for example, in the self love room, one of the pillars is you are the source of your love. And I talk in depth about that. And then I give you strategies. For example, in the in the clarity room, I talk about the guilt that we experience when we are trying to remember how I told you,

on your journey of discovering who you are, you have to do that through action. Like once you discover what you want to do with your life, you have to start working on it. And so I talk about how, oh, I lost my train of thought. I lost my train of thought. One of the pillars is about guilt. And so I tell you how to see how that guilt is not an indication that you need to stop moving in the direction that embraces who you are. It's an indication that you've been trained to believe that unless you live your life a certain way, you're not enough. So you feel guilty for letting someone down your family, your friends, you're, you feel guilty for doing that for yourself and selfish. So one of the pillars is don't let guilt stop you. So in the room, the room, the room or rooms that you get to create, you get to create your own pillars. So mine was I would add the writing room and my only pillar

would be write it as it is. And then at the very end, I talk about adapting to your new reality. And I talk about how after you've come home to yourself, I talk about adapting to your new reality. And I talk about how after you've come home to yourself, you will have people in your life who will say you're not like that you changed. And I tell you how to respond to them. And I tell you how to tell them, I've grieved my past self. And I grieved her on my own, or I grieved him on my own or I grieved him on my own or whatever your gender is, it's your responsibility to grieve that person on your own. Now I am somebody new and it's just like a powerful way to end this journey home to yourself. So I hope that gives a good explanation. Wow. I mean, you've inspired me so much and hopefully my audience as well,

they're going to listen to this. This is just astounding. It's beautiful. And everyone should be picking up this book. I'm going to share it with a lot of my friends. And of course, we'll be sharing it across our social media, which is extraordinary stuff in the analogy of the home and the rooms, the pillars, the outlets, and forming that sort of thing inside of us. Because there's a lot of people that say, well, you take inside of what you and you really you really can't conceptualize that but what you've done with your book is you've made it so there's a conceptualization that people can can can align with analogies and be like okay well i understand how to how to think about this and and make a build of it yes thank you for saying that. I really wanted Welcome Home to be

because I started writing poetry and I started writing prose. Mind Platter is actually a reflection of my journals, which I self-published, like it's a compilation of my journal entries. And so I started with that. And I always got the comment that, you know, your writing is deep. Like if I'm scrolling through Instagram and something pops up, I pause for a long time and it makes me think. And so I wanted Welcome Home to have that element of poeticness and realness and rawness. But at the same time, I wanted it to tell, I wanted it to combine poetry, storytelling and practical strategies, which I think self-help and self-development books

nowadays are either just strictly stories and practical strategies or strictly stories or strictly practical strategies. I wanted all of that. I want the person to feel heard, seen, understood, but I also want them to feel empowered to make that change. And through my own storytelling, it's saying this is coming from a real place. This is not just me feeding you this information. So I'm really excited for the world to read this. This is going to be really awesome. June 1st, guys, it's going to be on shelves.

You can take and preorder it now. Thank you so much, Najwa, for spending time with us today and doing all this stuff and just enlightening us into everything that you've written here and everything that's in the book. Thank you so much for having me. And thank you to all the people who listen to this. And I'm sending you so much love and healing. And we're sending it back. Thank you so much. This is, like you said, the bigger audience that you're going to be reaching and sharing with the world.

Hopefully so many people will be touched by your book and everything else. Thank you so much. This is, like you said, the bigger audience that you're going to be reaching and sharing with the world. Hopefully so many people will be touched by your book and everything else. Thank you. So to my audience, be sure to check it out. Welcome Home, a guide to building a home for your soul. You can order up June 1st. Get your advanced copies now, your pre-sales now, so that you can take and be the first one to say in your book clubs and stuff like, hey, we got to, I read it first. So anyway, thanks to everyone for being here. Thanks, Mads, for tuning in.

Go to youtube.com, 4chesschrisvoss to see the video version of this. Go to goodreads.com, 4chesschrisvoss, and all the groups we have on LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram. You pick it. We're always there. Thanks for everyone for being here, and we'll see you guys next time.